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O.K. So the market is rigged against regular low-speed investors, as financial writer Michael Lewis reminded us on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night.

Will that stop those investors from investing in stocks? As long as stocks tend to outperform most other liquid investment options most of the time, the answer, I think, is no. People need to put their money somewhere, and both mattresses and bonds have their shortcomings as well.

Obviously all regular investors would like to see any unfair advantages of the high-speed traders end. And they deserve nothing less. But most investors I know will continue to invest in both individual stocks and stock funds even if the day of a leveled playing field is a way's off.

For such investors, the biggest concerns right now are not the time advantages possessed by front-running quants but rather the more everyday issues related to valuations, interest rates, and earnings growth.

Not surprisingly, a Seeking Alpha piece that led that site in popularity most of Monday deals with the issue of whether it's time to short a stock market that has achieved fresh highs recently, despite an expectation at year end that a meaningful correction was in store.

Seeking Alpha

"With the bears swarming the equity markets like Russian troops in the Crimea, is it time for aggressive traders to get short this market?," asks Cam Hui, a portfolio manager with Qwest Investment Fund Management. "My inner trader is whispering, 'Not yet.' "

Hui's argument is built mostly on technical grounds. "While I am tilting bearish for the next few months, I would be hesitant about making a major commitment to get short here," he writes.

Among the things that could help stocks, he writes, are better corporate guidance "as we move through earnings season" and China announcing a new round of stimulus.

Still, he concludes that while he is negative on stocks for the short term, "my inner trader remains wary of being overly aggressive in taking a short position here."

The Reformed Broker

Meanwhile, Joshua Brown, the widely-read financial blogger and investment advisor, makes the case on his Reformed Broker site for moving away from the investment posture that has worked well in the past year. In other words, he writes, don't get caught up in the "Recency Effect", which he defines as the commonly-held belief that the environment we've just been in is somehow a permanent one.

"At this time of year, I'm more interested in whatever hasn't worked," he writes.

He points out ,for example, that since the Federal Reserve's most recent meeting, stocks have been performing quite differently than they did in the past year with U.S. stocks "slightly down, and foreign markets up.."